It is estimated that John Carter cost $250m to make and it is likely that Disney spent another $100m on marketing.
Reviewing the film on BBC 5 Live, Mark Kermode said: "The story telling is incomprehensible, the characterisation is ludicrous, the story is two and a quarter hours long and it's a boring, boring, boring two and a quarter hours long."
The Hollywood Reporter says that last year's biggest flop was Mars Needs Moms, which cost $150m to make and only took $39m at the box office.
Maybe it's not a good idea to make a movie about Mars!
The Avengers is going to have to make 200M on top of it's budget just for Disney to break even.
Cowboys & Aliens was extremely glad that Mars Needs Moms came out the same year because it took the heat off. I actually heard John Carter was a decent movie, unlike Cowboys & Aliens. Audience members are giving Jon Carter a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, which falls directly in line with the word of mouth I have heard. I'll watch it for sure, just not in theaters
2011 was jam packed with box office bombs! I wonder if 2012 will put up as many?
Disney really pushed this one too. I’m surprised they thought this had all of the tie-ins they need in order to push a movie with this budget forward. I just did not see where the audience in the US was going to come from.
My daughter saw Mars needs Moms on demand a few weeks back. She seemed to like it. But it seems that cgi movies using realistic looking humans never do well in the box office. I think it’s because the characters just look creepy in that style
I'm sure the corporate drones at Mouse Inc. will blame internet piracy or internet spoilers or internet something, but this lies fucking squarely in the lap of the marketing goons. They spent $100 million on a marketing campaign that was so bad it actually drove people away.
"There is at least as much need to curb the cruel greed and arrogance of part of the world of capital, to curb the cruel greed and violence of part of the world of labor, as to check a cruel and unhealthy militarism in international relationships." -Theodore Roosevelt
They did zero marketing of the movie over here apart from standees and posters in the theatres.
The film is a lot of could have beens - it's just not good enough. It's both too long and too impatiently crammed with details. It could have been a lot better as two 1 hr 30 films than as the one 2hr 12 film it is now. Acting: generally poor. Effects: decent, but marred by overeager post-3D and some of the most crappily storyboarded action sequences I've seen. This, in combination with some horrendous editing and a tacked-on romantic sub "plot" makes for a pretty poor movie. 2/6 for me.
IT'S HARD TO PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT; SOMETHING IS WRONG
I'M LIKE THE UNCLE WHO HUGGED YOU A LITTLE TOO LONG
Animalor wrote:Bought the 1st 5 books to the series after the fact for 3$ on Kindle.
Aren't they free now due to their age? Who got your money?
Its seems the Burroughs estate has filed a lawsuit against comic publishers Dynamite who’ve put together a visual adaptation of the books which actually depicts Dejah Thoris as flat out naked. The suit according to THR makes some vague claim of copyright infringement, but there is no copyright issue here since the John Carter books were written in 1912. Any copyright on them has long since expired and the books are now in the public domain, which means they aren’t copyrighted.